


cloudbusting

by doreah



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Disappointment, Gen, Platonic Soulmates, Sexual Violence, Suicidal Thoughts, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26787784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doreah/pseuds/doreah
Summary: What made Serena Joy special made her dangerous, which was part of the attraction, probably, and definitely part of the problem.akaJune finally gives up.
Relationships: June Osborne | Offred/Serena Joy Waterford
Comments: 10
Kudos: 39





	cloudbusting

\--

By the time June realises the truth, it’s already too late.

It was gone, everything was gone. _She_ was gone. 

And, if June wants to be honest—something she’s become less and less accustomed to since Gilead, it is probably better this way. It’s better to only know in retrospect because it definitely would have complicated things so much more if she had been aware at the time. That sort of thing is a pain in the ass, all the interference and melodrama it causes. Poor judgement. Carelessness. All the stupid, illogical decisions it inspires. 

It’s not like she doesn’t already have her fair share of those as it is—because she may seem like a reckless, egotistical idiot—hell, a downright narcissist probably—to every Martha and Commander around her, but there is still some remaining sliver of self-awareness even if it’s often eclipsed by a more virulent saviour complex nowadays. What else does she have left, really? All the same, common sense flashes once in a while, despite how it may appear.

June knows it could have been awful otherwise:

Two emotionally-charged, suspicious, stubborn, self-obsessive personalities on the same mission is worse than one. 

And if they’re in love? Even fucking worse. 

\--

Back in D.C., or whatever the fuck D.C. is called now, she had said all she needed to: the only truth that mattered to the only person that had mattered, at that moment. How sick it was to recognise that. For so many months, she’d worked—toiled more like, chipping at concrete in some pathetically idealistic and far too blindly optimistic attempt to bleed a stone.

Sure, there were cracks.

Baby Angela, a crack. The beating, a crack. Eden, a larger crack. Losing a finger, a crack. Giving up Nichole, a whole damn crevasse spanning weeks. But in the end, those made no difference at all to the overall integrity of the hard bedrock. Because what is a few hairline fractures when the entire base is held together with reinforced steel, caged with wires, and too heavy to shift?

But, nevertheless, at some point she can’t determine with any accuracy, June Osborne fell in love with an idea.

Not a person, she understands now. Just an idea. And her own sense of importance, probably. It wasn’t an active choice, and if she had any power at all, she would have stabbed those shears through Serena Joy’s neck when she had the chance. She still stands by what she cried out in the rubble of the Lincoln Memorial. She should have let Serena Joy Waterford burn in the fire she set for herself. The whole time, that is what she should have done. Not spent months, years really, chasing after a woman who had no intention to change, or even to feel for anybody but herself.

_I can see her; she can change._

No.

She’d touched Serena, let her touch too in the darkness, clung to her with an audience of men, stood beside her in public, aching to reach out and anchor their shared misery and ally-ship into reality. Each and every time believing that it would make a difference. When she should have cackled with the irony, June stood at the door listening to Serena cry, and lie. When she should have hated her, instead June sat with her, holding her hand tightly. When she should have walked the other way and not looked back, she pulled Serena away from the flames. Of course, all of it had also been a manipulation, and a poor one in retrospect, but the undercurrent of authenticity for something beyond just an ally against Gilead, a light at the end of the never-ending tunnel, was still present. 

Appeals to Serena Joy Waterford’s better nature had been the problem all along, because there is nothing to appeal to, deep down. She was empty and always had been.

She’d tried to break through somehow, since Nichole's future wasn’t working with Serena being blinded by the mirage of happy families. Her final weapon: “Have you seen their Handmaid?”

It was a last ditch effort. _Please show that you care_.

 _(About me_.) 

Even just a hint.

In the beginning, she'd wanted more, something big, some solid unshakeable proof but even in D.C. when everything was on the line, June found herself begging for only a brief taste of something resembling trust. Absolutely anything at all, no matter how small and fleeting as long as it was _real_. She didn't need deep, emotional confessionals or detailed schematics of tyrannical overthrow.

Now, she was prepared to accept crumbs.

Fuck, she would have taken even a flinch but she got a dead stare ahead. Not even the wisp of acknowledgement, and that should have been enough to cement the reality of Serena Joy Waterford.

Of course, every plea went unheard in the end, and June should have known begging for recognition as they sat around a children’s tea party set would have made no difference after all. Serena was in her element once again, and her desires extended only so far as to soothe herself with her own stubborn self-obsession. Perhaps the void left behind when she had to abandon all her obnoxious false intellectualism and performative outrage over humanity’s fate was too gaping, and without the written word to bandage her wounds, she sought solace only in ownership, believing the answer to loneliness was control and holding another person captive for life. But not anybody, because, for all intents and purposes she could have held June prisoner as long as she desired in Gilead. So, not June. A baby. A voiceless, vulnerable, and pliable stopgap for real love.

She grabbed for her arm and Serena coldly pulled away. As always like a yo-yo.

Serena Joy never wanted an ally, never wanted a friend, never wanted a lover, never wanted anything she couldn’t control and especially nobody who called her into question with herself at all. Each of those require a capacity to feel something— _anything_ for others and not just herself. There was no capacity for love in there, and it took June far too long to finally understand that.

How many betrayals had it been? How many nights spent pleading and crying only for Serena to turn around the next day and undo everything? How many lies and excuses and thin justifications had it been before she finally saw Serena for who she truly was, and not the idealised version she’d dreamed up in her head as she fantasised about freedom and revolution, right there on the same creaky mattress in the same prison household Serena had designed.

How could she have been so goddamn stupid? 

Love, maybe? Not even the romantic kind, just some strange, cancerous mutation of it. It’s the sort of thing that inspires dumb shit like hope, blinds people, makes them act like morons. What made Serena special made her dangerous, which was part of the attraction, probably, and definitely part of the problem. And now they are so intimately entangled that nobody can untie the knots.

It’s all rather convenient that it took until it was too late to fully come to terms with that. June knows well how different things would have been if, from the beginning or near enough to it, she had been aware that she loved Serena Joy Waterford, and how much her hate mirrored a cheap facsimile of love. How confused she would have been, and how much more docile in some ways, aggressive in others.

If she had known, she never would have let it get this far.

\--

A dream. Once. Maybe more, but she only remembers the one, after D.C. when she had claimed to say, "Enough."

There had been no Nick, no Moira, no Luke, no Hannah, no Fred, no Gilead. Not ever, it seemed. 

Serena is wearing way too much blue eye shadow but her hair is down, and shorter, and her clothes jet black like moonless midnight, like a black hole and just as inescapable. She isn't the woman that stalked the creaky hallways of that burned down household with nothing but impotence and rage in her steps. June is still in red, but it hangs loosely from her shoulders like a thick sheet, hiding everything that makes her a woman on the outside, everything that makes her valuable in Gilead.

When Serena's hand touches the red sheet, it disintegrates. Moving closer, she ghosts the pads of her thumbs tenderly across June's lips, lingering with doubt, and tells her, "Oranges are not truly my favourite fruit, June."

When June tentatively reaches out to return the touch, to hold and be held, Serena disappears and June stares into her own reflection. Her eyeshadow is too thick and too blue. Her clothes are black.

She'd awoken, pining for something more.

\--

In the hospital, day after day of kneeling in stark white rooms with methodically beeping machines, June was not herself. She knew that, Janine knew that, the doctor knew that, Aunt Lydia knew that. The only one who didn’t was Serena. Which, in the end, goes to show how little she cared to actually _know_ June at all.

The way she sauntered in as if nothing had happened between them, her vacant expression, as if the last time they met wasn’t them shouting insincere death wishes at each other to cover up everything else. How stupid a woman, to think she is so desirable even then. 

And then, her real name slipping from Serena’s lips—again, with her touch, steadying yet unsure. 

“You’re not okay.”

 _No shit, Sherlock. Look at me!_ She didn’t want sympathy; she wanted to scream. She wanted to be seen.

But those hands that had hurt so many times, that voice that had shrieked, all of it. It almost worked. It almost broke her. Almost.

That June in the hospital: Crazy June (maybe Real June), she knew the truth. The only way for her to be free was for Serena to cease to exist to her. Hannah barely factored into any decisions, because nothing was rooted in reality, in logic. Just pain. And as long as Serena Joy Waterford was in her life, June would not be free. She would still feel, she would still long for something different, she would still _hope_.

She should have known better.

It has to end.

Her stabs came out weakly and uncoordinated, as if her muscles could not quite hear her mind, her heart at odds with everything else. It was _a miracle_ , as Serena would say in that bland way of hers, that June didn’t succeed right then and there because surely June would have died too, and Hannah would never be free. Serena bled, but not enough to matter, and why would it have ever been any other way? June never held the power she fantasised about; she was never as clever and strong as she thought, and she truly did not have the will to die either. 

Killing Serena would be suicide; _in this world,_ _if she goes, I go too_. Like some perverted Rube Goldberg machine. At least, at that point in time, that had been the truth.

She knew that, and if that isn’t some horrible curse of something appropriating love, she wasn’t sure what it could be. Instead, she sliced an arm and found her own stigmata in retaliation as Serena screeched above her once again about what a pitiful disappointment, what a fraud June was in the end. 

“Likewise, Mrs. Waterford,” she would have said if the bloodlust had subsided for even a second.

Instead, she bled quietly onto white tile, still pathetically waiting for the real miracle: Serena was supposed to be one of the strong ones too.

\--

Still, she occasionally misses the bleak, miserable presence in her life because her nails are digging into the fear of being hopeless. If she holds onto that, to her, there has to be something left. And the pointless craving doesn't seem all that much worse than Gilead as a whole.

Then she reminds herself that Serena doesn't miss her, never cared, only wanted to use her as some type of cheap, last-ditch comfort to soothe and amuse herself, in a space that allowed for nothing else. 

June wants to think she's better than being only that to someone. She prays on it. At least she still has that left.

\--

Later, because the world of Gilead could not permit them to remain apart, Serena was back again, striding directly towards her despite the sea of red and white, despite the Commanders and Aunts, seeing only June. As if everything had happened yet it hadn’t at all, they exchanged silences and the twist of lips. More however, she looked into Serena’s eyes and knew the familiar feeling. Again, the stupid, idiotic, constant prickle of something like hope.

 _This time is different_. _This will be when it all changes, finally._

It didn’t. It got worse, in fact. She found herself on her back with Commander Lawrence’s penis forcibly inside her, and Serena calmly waiting downstairs to ensure the act was complete, playing cheerleader to a wholly inconsolable and damaged Eleanor: the way a woman should be in the face of such atrocities, not as heartless and austere as Serena always had been.

For a second, after the act when Aunt Lydia attended to her inspection and Serena hovered in the doorway, June wanted to cry. She begged some god, any god, somewhere for Serena to come in, place her hands on her shoulders again and whisper her name because nobody else would do it. There was little else in this hollow belly of Gilead to have faith in. Instead, the coward asked after Eleanor, ignored June’s pain once again, and carried on with her duty as the doctor entered. 

The unlubricated latex fingers jammed into her, worse than the rape had been somehow, and June wondered why she was so undeserving of a hero of her own, and why nobody was interested in saving her. 

\--

It hadn’t been in her plans; it hadn’t even been in her worst nightmares—and there were never a shortage of those. Mrs. Waterford, with all her posturing, gaudy intellectual pursuits, aloofness, and brutal stoicism complemented by an ineffable impermeability to anything that made her remotely vulnerable to others was not anything June wanted. Except June had glimpsed inside and torn away the masks, momentarily, in pieces, over time, something burrowed into her. It felt like lice, really, all itchy and uncomfortable and left her incapable of ever totally ridding herself of it.

She’d seen shadows of the Serena that existed somewhere else, in another alternate universe where things like soulmates were said to dwell, despite all the evil. But then, maybe hope itself is an accomplice to evil as well; that’s why it was at the bottom of Pandora’s box. 

Serena Joy was cold, impulsively violent, selfish, unromantic, obsessed with aesthetic and trivial decorum, too observant of social mores. (Well, the ones she agreed with.) Her pedantic use of language and absolutely frustrating lack of flexibility when it came to complex ethical considerations drove June mad. So-called purity and godliness at all costs, even to the extent of forgoing compassion, forgoing human connection in all its forms seemed worse than the open-handed slaps. June especially resented how difficult she had to sweat to even chip away at the very smallest piece and how, every step forward, just when she was getting somewhere, Serena would throw up a new wall, sturdier and more impossible to scale than the last.

Mrs. Waterford: the walking embodiment of self-interest.

In fairness, Serena had warned her: “Don’t be stupid.” More than once, never concealing her true self.

It didn’t matter. Each time, June forgave, because that was the only power she had left and the thirst for hope was coursing through her blood, hotly, every time Serena came close to doing something or _being_ good. Of course, she never did or was. Why would she when the alternate was so much safer?

On a loop, Serena disappointed and June excused it with the ever-present, “Next time it'll be different.” 

\--

The last time June ever saw Serena Joy Waterford was in the Lawrences' foyer, strangely subdued but typically unapologetic all the same. Like some recurring night terror, Serena had stalked behind her all the way down the stairs and there was a weight to the air, as if she wanted to speak but found herself unexpectedly silenced. It was bullshit because Serena was anything but mute and never at a loss for words, and it confirmed once more that Serena is only nice when she’s up to something, when she wants something—and there was nothing left for her to take from June.

She could have said so much, even with just a single syllable, a whisper, the tenor of even the most remote kindness. _Just say my name once more, like you did before_. But she failed, again. 

For the last time, June swore as the door closed behind the Waterfords.

When she entered the kitchen, a bowl of fruit with a perfect, ripe orange on top greeted her. She longed to snatch it up and crush it into messy pulp between her hands because oranges are not just oranges here, and it hadn’t been there this morning. 

It was probably then that June decided it was time to let the whole thing rot. 

Forgiveness had run its course, and her heart couldn’t take anymore disappointment. Every single time she pleaded with God or whoever the fuck was responsible for all this shit to do something, to make Serena do something, it fell on deaf ears. Prayer was as useless as thinking people can change.

\--

That was then. There are no more "next times" left.

Hate requires too much energy, and all that costs too much. Instead, she accepts the fluorescent burden of love instead, and pushes it aside. Shoves it in a box, places it down in a quiet dark hole, far at the back of her mind, and tries to forget it lives there. It sits, covered with a ratty blanket and heavy soil, some costume to maintain the facade of being unwanted and abandoned. Beside it, buried even deeper, another cloudy container: the one that held her faith in Serena. It’s rusted around the lid, corroded with the lack of use lately. She wishes more than anything to smash the jar to pieces and pour it out, out, out into the sky like Pandora did. Let loose the final and worst evil of all. 

She can’t. That just isn’t who June Osborne is.

So, she shovels earth on top of it all, ignores the rattle, and wishes more than anything for Serena Joy to die.

\--

That night, as June lies in bed with a dull bruising ache between her legs once again, she realises Serena is the hopeless one, and holding onto some fantasy of change is a fool’s game. Disappointment rips at her skin worse than any lashing had done. It's time.

The hope hurts so much more. It’s worn her down; Gilead is winning.

 _Suicide_ , she thinks again. 

“You will never be free of me.” She hears the voice in her memory, but it doesn’t sound like her own anymore. She answers the night, “I _will_ let you burn.”

\--

Lawrence tells her the news. For a moment, she doesn’t understand why tears begin to fill her vision because she’s not sad, not in the least. But she isn’t exactly happy either, as much as she knows she should be celebrating karma’s wonderful bounty. Briefly, she recognises the reason but brushes it away.

She laughs, then, face in her hands. June hasn’t laughed in a long time and the muscles feel sore, out of practice and the sound is too eerie. It bangs against the inside of her skull, like she’s listening to a recording of herself from across the room. Still, she doesn’t stop.

Finally, she thinks.

_I’m free._

The bitter tang of relief floods her veins, swooping through her body and taking her laughter along for the ride. Serena is gone. War crimes and orange jumpsuits. A death sentence. She knew what she was doing, and where she was going the whole time. _Suicide,_ June reckons once more, but this time knows it’s not on her head; it was not a sacrifice for _them_. She knows her fate never once factored into Serena Joy’s considerations.

She laughs again, louder.

 _Fuck it_. She doesn’t have to be disappointed anymore. Draping herself in the black of her dreams, she can let go of the faith she’d clung pointlessly to for so long. There is always the point, after a mistake, when the yo-yo never returns. 

Like the sun coming out, she can breathe. Reminding herself of all the ways she’d be wronged by that woman, she wipes at her eyes, stalling the tears. No more disillusionment, no more failure, no more hope, all of it eaten by the dark. Nothing but The Cause. The cold, sinister creature living inside Serena has also taken up residence inside June.

Serena is burning at last, and June should be happy. _Is_ happy.

\--

Rita is in. The plan is happening. They share sly smiles about the Waterfords' fate over a pile of organic carrots. Then Offred (or Ofjoseph, she supposes) in her red uniform and white cap, walks home with a Guardian for company. Offred is still in Gilead but June is free.

The sun is bright, for once, beating down without a cloud in the sky. It’s been four days since it rained.

Her left hand holding the bag of groceries begins to warm. The sun’s intensity doesn’t cease as she walks faster now, and her hand heats more in its direct light. She flexes her fingers around the handle of the bag, sensing something. 

She smells the harsh smoke of burning linens. She touches a warm and trembling hand, interconnected, grasping, and knows that as free as June is now, despite all logic and sanity, she can still feel _her_. Everywhere. It’s a deep-rooted sickness, plain and simple, this desire for rain clouds.

God, she’s _such_ a fucking cliché.

Neither suicide nor self-preservation seem important, and if one or the other comes during her latest mission, so be it. The Guardian stumbles over a crack in the pavement where a weed is poking through, and June quickly stifles a laugh, a real one. Like before in Joseph's office. The earth is coming up; reclamation is slowly beginning in the smallest of ways.

The sun is still too hot. She still smells the smoke.

In the back of her mind, there’s a box and a jar, buried under layers and layers of heavy soil.

She can't help herself. Resentfully, her fingers rake through the dirt.

  
  
  
  


\--

**Author's Note:**

> I still hate S3, especially the end of it. I still have no hope for S4. So this is what happened while I tried to make peace with June's behaviour at the end of S3. Not sure I even like it...
> 
> In case anybody is interested in what "Cloudbusting" is really about, not the false optimistic slant most people think it has, and how I used it here, [a link!](https://www.musicmusingsandsuch.com/musicmusingsandsuch/2020/8/8/feature-dreams-of-orgonon-kate-bushs-cloudbusting) Hopefully, it'll make sense to you too. If nothing else, enjoy an intimate look at Kate Bush's song.


End file.
